/m/business

Reader Comments and Retorts

Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.

Well, I now have aided and abetted MLB.com in its revenue-raising ventures, which I’d rather not do. When I retired from the Times in 2008, a high-ranking official offered me the opportunity to write for MLB.com. I said no, thank you. Having covered M.L.B. for many years, I felt it would have been some sort of conflict. But here I am helping their advertising.

How would it have been a conflict if he was no longer covering MLB for a media outlet and if he had never tried to use that media outlet work as a stepping stone to the job working for MLB?

It's possible Chass thinks that even trying to cover MLB for MLB.com is a significant conflict of interest, though the "Having covered MLB for many years..." clause would seem to imply that's not what he's going for in this passage.

Some of us in the business, however, don’t see why the new guys on the block can’t exercise the old professionalism and simply separate editorial from advertising. MLB.com’s media wall isn’t high enough.

I agree. Now let me tell you about the wonderful Church of Scientology....

My guess is he looks at it as being similar to folks who swing from working for the regulatory agency for industry X to working as a lobbyist for industry X -- i.e. to go from covering MLB for a company "independent" of MLB (Red Sox stake aside) to working for MLB seems not quite kosher. Of course it happens all the time.

Now ...

There's a hole in MLB's media wall where all the money goes
And Murray Chass wrote for nothing I suppose ...

The NY Times employing Murray Chass to write for them was a bigger stain on journalism than anything MLB does advertising their products. And if MLB.com wanted to pay Murray Chass to write about baseball, that's also a bigger stain on them than hawking MLB.tv subscriptions.

He was just trying to seem important by playing the "conflict of interest" card, I guess. There's clearly no conflict of interest if you're working for one party and only that party, and unambiguously so. Say I was working for a newspaper as a critic, and then an orchestra wanted me to be their program annotator. First I'm working for an independent entity covering them, and then I'm working directly for them, so it might be a conflict of interest to do both jobs at once, but not in succession.

He was just trying to seem important by playing the "conflict of interest" card, I guess. There's clearly no conflict of interest if you're working for one party and only that party, and unambiguously so. Say I was working for a newspaper as a critic, and then an orchestra wanted me to be their program annotator. First I'm working for an independent entity covering them, and then I'm working directly for them, so it might be a conflict of interest to do both jobs at once, but not in succession.

That does create at the very least the appearance of something a bit more untoward. If you were interviewing to work for the orchestra while writing reviews about the orchestra your independence would be in question.

I think Murray is a little too worked up here though. It's not like MLB.com was acting as an independent authority on the subject. In theory any article written on MLB.com about baseball qualifies as an ad since that is the product they make their money on. The blurring of the line between ad and news is one that is troubling but I also think that we as consumers have an obligation to be able to recognize that an article on MLB.com is likely to portray MLB in the best possible light. This isn't a secondary relationship (such as the NYT and the Red Sox used to have) where the relationship wouldn't be obvious.

That does create at the very least the appearance of something a bit more untoward. If you were interviewing to work for the orchestra while writing reviews about the orchestra your independence would be in question.

Beyond that, it suggests that one might have been writing your reviews in such a way so as to make yourself more attractive to the orchestra down the road.

There's an inherent conflict in MLB.com, in that it's covering the industry that's supporting it. If an MLB.com reporter discovers proof that the owners colluded against Barry Bonds, what happens? Now, there's potential conflict for every newsgathering organization, depending on the situation. It just happens to be much more obvious and unavoidable with MLB.com.

However, as Vaux notes, that really has nothing to do with Murray Chass (other than his own internal conflict, which matters to no one but Murray). As long as he's only working for that site, and not also getting a paycheck from somewhere else, then there's simply no conflict involving that employment, which thankfully didn't materialize (and I doubt anyone is happier about that than the folks at MLB.com).

Some years back (damn, I guess it'll be seven come May) I worked for MLB.com as an "associate reporter." Read: intern. I was sent to Cleveland to help cover the Indians.

Before the internship started, one of my many, many, many bosses held a conference call with all the interns. At one point, an intern spoke up and asked how balanced and objective the reporting was supposed to be, considering the unique relationship between the journalistic outlet and the people it was covering.

My boss said it was a fine question, then laid out the standard they used. If you imagined the objectivity of reporting on a 1-10 scale, with one being straight PR work, 10 being a miserable, Baylessian, "everything sucks everywhere" approach and five being right-down-the-middle, perfectly fair, just-the-facts-ma'am reporting, the stuff we wrote for MLB.com should be a four. Maybe a three at certain moments.

Some MLB.com writers handle their situations very well. My old supervisor in Cleveland, Anthony Castrovince, is, to my mind, an excellent, compelling writer who's able to convey the (often negative) reality of a situation quite well. On the other hand, MLB.com's Braves' beat writer, Mark Bowman, is, to my mind, a mere mouthpiece for the organization, not to mention a piss-poor writer.